A Chinese team has discovered a new bat coronavirus that poses the risk of animal-to-human transmission because it uses the same human receptor as the virus that causes COVID-19.

The study, the South China Morning Post reports, was led by Shi Zhengli, the prominent virologist known as “batwoman” for her extensive research on bat coronaviruses, at the Guangzhou Laboratory along with researchers from the Guangzhou Academy of Sciences, Wuhan University and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shi worked at the Wuhan institute, which is at the center of the controversy over the origins of Covid.

While there is still no consensus on the origin of COVID-19, some studies have suggested an initial connection in bats and that it passed to humans via an intermediate animal host. Shi also denied that the Wuhan institute was responsible for the pandemic.

The latest discovery is a new lineage of the coronavirus HKU5 first identified in the Japanese bat in Hong Kong: it comes from the merbecovirus subgenus, which includes the Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) virus.

It is able to bind to the human angiotensin-converting enzyme, the same receptor used by the virus.

Sars-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, to infect cells.

“We report the discovery and isolation of a distinct lineage (lineage 2) of HKU5-CoV, which can utilize not only bat Ace2, but also human Ace2 and several mammalian Ace2 orthologs (genes found in different species with a common ancestry),” the researchers wrote in a paper published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Cell. The finding revealed that the virus, once isolated from bat samples, could infect human cells and artificially cultured cell masses or tissues that resembled miniaturized respiratory or intestinal organs.

In early February, Cell published a paper by a team from the University of Washington in Seattle and Wuhan University that concluded that while the HKU5 strain could bind to the ACE2 receptors of bats and other mammals, they did not detect “efficient” human binding. But Shi’s team said that HKU5-CoV-2 was better adapted to human ACE2 than lineage 1 of the virus and “may have a broader host range and greater potential for cross-species infection.” They said more monitoring of the virus was needed, even though its efficiency was “significantly lower” than that of Covid-19, and that the “risk of emergence of (HKU5-CoV-2) in human populations should not be exaggerated.”

(Online Union)

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